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The musty smell, the bugs, the lonliness, this room, which is part of the street outside-this is all I want from life.
Jean Rhys
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Jean Rhys
Age: 88 †
Born: 1890
Born: August 24
Died: 1979
Died: May 14
Novelist
Writer
Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams
Ella Rees Williams
Streets
Room
Rooms
Musty
Part
Bugs
Life
Smell
Street
Outside
More quotes by Jean Rhys
It's so easy to make a person who hasn't got anything seem wrong.
Jean Rhys
before I could read, almost a baby, I imagined that God, this strange thing or person I heard about, was a book.
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Stephan was secretive and a liar, but he was a very gentle and expert lover. She was the petted, cherished child, the desired mistress, the worshipped, perfumed goddess. She was all these things to Stephan - or so he made her believe.
Jean Rhys
One realized all sorts of things. The value of an illusion, for instance, and that the shadow can be more important than the substance. All sorts of things.
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Age seldom arrives smoothly or quickly. It's more often a succession of jerks.
Jean Rhys
I have arranged my little life.
Jean Rhys
As it was in the beginning, ... is now, and ever shall be, world without end.
Jean Rhys
No past to make us sentimental, no future to embarrass us...a difficult moment when you are out of practice - a moment that makes you go cold, cold and wary.
Jean Rhys
I am the only real truth I know.
Jean Rhys
Even the one moment that you thought was your eternity fades out and is forgotten and dies.
Jean Rhys
She haunted him, as an ungenerous action haunts one.
Jean Rhys
When you are a child you are yourself and you know and see everything prophetically. And then suddenly something happens and you stop being yourself you become what others force you to be. You lose your wisdom and your soul.
Jean Rhys
I watched her die many times. In my way, not in hers. In sunlight, in shadow, by moonlight, by candlelight. In the long afternoons when the house was empty. Only the sun was there to keep us company. We shut him out. And why not? Very soon she was as eager for what's called loving as I was - more lost and drowned afterwards.
Jean Rhys
You can pretend for a long time, but one day it all falls away and you are alone. We are alone in the most beautiful place in the world.
Jean Rhys
Now I no longer wish to be loved, beautiful, happy or successful. I want one thing and one thing only - to be left alone.
Jean Rhys
I sit at my window and the words fly past me like birds — with God's help I catch some.
Jean Rhys
Of course she had some pathetic illusions about herself or she would not be able to go on living.
Jean Rhys
After all this, what happened? What happened was that, as soon as I had the slightest chance of a place to hide in, I crept into it and hid. Well, sometimes it's a fine day isn't it? Sometimes the skies are blue. Sometimes the air is light, easy to breathe. And there is always tomorrow.
Jean Rhys
And what does anyone know about traitors, or why Judas did what he did?
Jean Rhys
I must write. If I stop writing my life will have been an abject failure. It is that already to other people. But it could be an abject failure to myself. I will not have earned death.
Jean Rhys
